Would you feel the same way about free speech? Shouldn’t writing racist screeds be “a crime” since the the KKK benefits form and advocates for such freedom?
I disagree strongly. The pre-clearance requirements were instituted because those state and local governments were absolutely in the discrimination business.
Like I said, I don’t remember the details very well. The principle is that the government must not be in the discrimination business. If they are, they are clearly not acting in a libertarian fashion. It’s one of the premises listed in the OP.
I disagree with the OP; government exists for the purpose of protecting the weak from the strong. How would libertarians feel about steering minorities into ghettos by not selling or renting real estate in white areas, then denying them services such as banking, insurance and medical care based on their address, the practice known as redlining? How would the libertarian version of a free market prevent white majorities from ghettoizing persons of color? It has been demonstrated over and over many whites would rather sacrifice profits than live with minorities.
If that is the freedom libertarians are defending, I do not support libertarianism.
This is not a Libertarian issue. It is a policy issue related to federalism.
So Libertarians have no opinion on it?
That’s not the same thing. Of course libertarians can have an opinion, in the same way they might have an opinion as to whether our national symbol should be the eagle or the turkey. It’s just not informative of Libertarian philosophy.
Governments can’t discriminate. Whether those that do discriminate get 3 lashes or 6 lashes as punishment is a policy issue.
Are you sure about this? I’ve known many libertarians, and I think all of them thought this issue was very much related to libertarian philosophy. The libertarian’s I’ve known have, in general, deferred to states’ rights if they are in conflict with the federal government.
I think what John is saying is that government discrimination is related to libertarian philosophy as stated in the OP. Whether or not there are pre-clearance requirements is not a matter of philosophy - it’s a policy issue.
I think a lot of libertarians support a federalist system with strong autonomy for the states. However there is no reason that a Libertarian country needs to be set up like the US. Whether they think they can get more Libertarian institutions at the more local level or whether they simply are American-centric and don’t understand that Libertarian government don’t require a federalist system, I don’t know. A US state can be just as non-Libertarian as the Federal government can, so I’m often baffled by this.
I, myself, like a federalist system, but not for Libertarian reasons. I like it because the US just so damn big, and one size does not fit all. As I’ve said before, the less the good folks in Louisiana and Mississippi have to say about how us folks in California live, the better! I’m sure they mean well, but we don’t need them “helping” us decide what our textbooks say or whether gays can marry or whatnot.
It’s actually a superb question. Why do we tolerate such speech, when other major democratic nations – Canada, Britain, Germany, Japan – have limits on overt racist speech and publication. Have they lost any real meaningful freedom that way?
Here, most First Amendment absolutists are stuck with a slippery slope argument: they don’t want minor infringements on speech, because of the danger of expansion of those limits. If we can’t say, “The Jews are loathesome subhumans,” will someone then come along and forbid Pastor John from saying, “The Jews killed Christ” or even “The Jews rejected the Messiah?” Where exactly is the line between denigration and criticism? If depictions of the Nazi Swastika are forbidden, how could one write a history of the 20th Century? If denigrations of nationalities are forbidden, can I get in trouble for writing about Japanese or Jewish or Rwandan or Bosnian atrocities?
The compromise that the U.S. has worked out is the “hate crime” intensification of sentencing for actual crimes – rape, murder, arson – which can be demonstrated to have racial/religious/ethnic/etc. bigotry as part of the crime’s intent. The guy who shot at people in Kansas, who was targeting Jews, can get a harsher penalty than if he were merely targeting people from Baltimore.
The big difference I see here is that relaxed speech controls mean both bad things (people get to say things that I don’t like) and good things (people get to say things that I do like). Relaxed discrimination laws mean bad things (people get to discriminate on unreasonable grounds)… and that’s it. You can make a case for both of them on an intangible “freedom, in general, is worthy of protection in and of itself” ground, but there’s no tangible “good side” to allowing discriminatory business practices that I can see, to balance the scales. So for my part, I think there’s considerable difference between the two.
Oh, one other thing. I think a lot of Libs feel that if the states have more freedom to do things their own way, then they can move to a more libertarian place if they like. Much easier than moving to a more libertarian country. But again, there is nothing inherent in a state government, other than the size of the state, that makes it more or less libertarian than a federal government. In the US, we consider states to have plenary power, but they all have constitution that limit that power, too.
Hate crimes are not a compromise for free speech. Hate crimes came about much later than free speech.
In addition, hate crimes add additional penalties based on the thoughts of a person committing the crime. I’m not sure if my opposition is rooted in libertarian ideals, but I think the idea of hate crimes is terrible. Thoughts should not be the basis of crimes, only actions.
Even still, this doesn’t address the other areas that I mentioned earlier. We currently have a lot of policies that allow bad guys to commit more crimes - the 5th and 4th amendment, rules of evidence, right to a lawyer, innocent until proven guilty, etc. All of these things result in bad guys being able to commit more crimes. Of course, there are other benefits as well and we have decided that they outweigh those negative outcomes. The idea that we allow bad outcomes to achieve something else is widely accepted. It’s just a question of where you draw the line.
How is this in any way a contradiction to anything I said? It would be rather amusing if a compromise came about before the conflict of parties and interests!
Intent has been a part of sentencing for a very long time. It’s one of the ways we separate first degree murder from lesser crimes.
In other words, the existence of hate crimes are not a compromise to allowing awful speech because awful speech was allowed for a significant amount of time before the existence of hate crimes. The allowance of awful speech is a result of allowing all speech. This would be the case with or without hate crimes - they are not connected.
Intent is not the same as what is being penalized as a hate crime. In the case of murder, the mens rea is that the person intended to commit the killing as compared to someone who accidentally killed a person. A hate crime is about why the person committed the crime, because they were a particular race or gender. The intent can be present without the ‘why’. Not at all the same.
I’m still unclear on what the benefits are of allowing businesses to discriminate. Most other civil rights, I support even though they sometimes lead to bad outcomes, because they often also lead to go outcomes. What’s the good outcome from allowing businesses to discriminate?
Just because one concern pre-exists the other, doesn’t mean there can’t be a compromise between the two concerns. We’ve created lots of compromises with the first amendment. The Bill of Rights doesn’t contain exceptions on free speech for libel, or causing a panic. Those were both compromises that were adopted when it became clear that there were some problems with implementing the concept of free speech into a functional civil society.
I’d like to see a response to this, too. And an addendum: if we switched to a libertarian form of government, and despite your* expectations, Jim Crow did come back full force, would that be sufficient for you to change your mind about the advisability of anti-discrimination laws?
*“you” meaning the libertarians in this thread, of course, not Fear Itself.
Re-reading, and based on what you wrote, I think I interpreted the line of discussion different than what was intended. I understood the message to be that we allow hateful speech because we have hate crime laws to address certain behavior. I think what was intended when the term compromised was used was that hate crime laws are a compromise to absolute free speech. If that’s the case, then I agree with that. However, the overall point that we allow awful speech because we value the overall benefit of free speech stands.
The benefit is not from allowing businesses to discriminate - that is a cost. It is an objectively negative thing as I see it. However, the overall benefit is getting government out of business. It’s allowing businesses to operate free of other stifling regulation. Each specific regulation could be argued individually on their merits, or we can do away with them wholesale and accept the good with the bad.
Libertarians as a general rule do not view minorities as weak people in either the political or practical sense. We believe that all types of people have the ability to survive and thrive on their own as long as governmental, institutional obstacles do not favor any race, ethnicity or religion. We find the idea that they need special help as individuals both presumptive and patronizing when it comes from people with other political ideologies.
I know that sounds hopelessly idealistic but there are plenty of real-world examples. I grew up in the rural South and my home-town was roughly 50-50 black and white with hardly any other groups. I now live in the progressive utopia of Franklin, Massachusetts which has been newly minted ‘the safest city in America’. We are 93% white with a few Asians, some mixed people and less than 1.5% black (I can tell you from experience the vast majority of them are New England Patriots players and their families). My immediate area is one of the most segregated places in the U.S. because ‘it is a really good place to raise kids’ yet it gets applauded for its great stats time and time again.
Meanwhile, in the ‘evil South’, some black people thrive and some fail yet that is their home. Do you really think think so-called progressive ideas have made the less successful ones any more welcome in any other part of the country than they are in Georgia or Alabama? The answer is no. As a matter of fact, they would be less welcome where I live now than than they ever would be in Mississippi or South Carolina and they know that so that is why there extremely few around. Don’t ever pat yourself on the back about your progressive racial ideals until you live in a place that has at least 1/3rd of its population as a single minority. That has nothing to do with libertarian ism in particular. Even the socialist utopias of Sweden and Denmark are having trouble with that phenomenon these days.